CERN lets general public look at 300TB of data on the Internet

European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has made 300 terabytes of information regarding the Large Hadron Collider available to the general public.

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest particle collider, constructed with the purpose to understand the fundamental structure of the universe.  

Amidst the 300TB consisting of raw data that CERN scientist used themselves and processed user-friendly data targeted at high-school students, is 100TB of data about proton collisions with the energy of 7 TeV.

The data that CERN is giving away for free is potentially worth millions if not billions of dollars but the research facility have their reasons. Opening up this portal can inspire the general public and yield some fortuitous results.

“Members of the CMS Collaboration put in lots of effort and thousands of person-hours each of service work in order to operate the CMS detector and collect these research data for our analysis,” explains Kati Lassila-Perini, a CMS physicist who leads these data-preservation efforts. “However, once we’ve exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly. The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high-school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow. And personally, as CMS’s data-preservation co-ordinator, this is a crucial part of ensuring the long-term availability of our research data.”

You can view all 300TB of data on CERN’s Open Data Portal.